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Twitter Streaming API

Fri, 10/02/2009 - 04:14 — metarobert
I'm experimenting with the twitter streaming API. BeStream is currently a real-time stream of everyone I follow on Twitter and all messages sent to them (Not including messages from people with private timelines) It's archiving everything to sqlite database, so I'll have a copy of my twitter stream even when twitter doesn't keep it anymore. There is no admin type interface yet.

Ads In BeTwittered

Fri, 08/29/2008 - 16:40 — metarobert
Sadly, I finally had to give in.  I got my bill for the server and bandwidth costs.  It surprised me to see that the continued growth of BeTwittered pushed me over my 1 Terabyte net traffic allowance.  I'll have to pay for bandwidth on top of the normal charge for the server.  I hated to do it, but I've put adsense ads at the bottom of the gadget, below the timeline.  I need to find an effective way to recoup the costs, adsense doesn't appear to be it.  I guess I'll find out over the next week.  I also found o

Twitter Ping checks Twitter services

Sun, 08/10/2008 - 16:22 — metarobert
I put a small service together on 32Hours to "ping" Twitter services.  The services available to check Twitter were not helping me much, so I decided to write a little app that actually checks a few extra things: 1) Is Twitter is up (they all do this, but it's not enough now that Twitter "degrades") 2) Checks the Twitter service response (http response - 200's are good) 3) How long it takes to connect to Twitter 4) how long it takes to finish the entire process of getting the public timeline. If you'd like to have a look

Twitter identity controversy? Or a Betwittered Bug? Oy!

Thu, 07/24/2008 - 16:08 — metarobert
I've gotten linked into a bit of a mess related to Twitter.  It appears that a Twitter user named Tocaya posted a message, which then appeared as coming from another Twitter user, Louis Gray.  Very bad news.  The part where I come into the picture?  BeTwittered was the source of the message.  I have some investigating to do.

BeTwittered Beta Progress, PreBeTwittered.

Sun, 07/06/2008 - 02:23 — metarobert
PreBeTwittered has come a long way this weekend.  I actually got several hours to update it.  I've changed the interface a bit.  I also added replies, direct messaging.  Everything seems to be working, even in IE, which can be a serious challenge sometimes.  Because everything does seem to be working, I'll probably put it into the production version (BeTwittered) tonight and start on some new features.  Next up: paging back through tweet "history" and viewing your reply and direct message lists.

Twitter Infrastructure Sucks, and Sucks Bad.

Thu, 05/29/2008 - 07:34 — metarobert
An interesting issue has begun to take the front seat for BeTwittered, our Twitter client for iGoogle. Load on a server is a simple problem. More load requires more CPU, RAM, bandwidth, etc. Very uncomplicated, yes? Now, ignoring other factors, like web server setup and optimization, other services running on the server, etc; what if we complicate this simple equation by throwing in a messaging application? Being ignorant in creating BeTwittered, it never occurred to me that I was creating a messaging application.

BeTwittered Gadget Popularity

Sat, 03/15/2008 - 11:44 — metarobert
It's really kind of stunning.  What started out as a learning experience, and a bit of a hobby, got a lot more attention than I expected.  BeTwittered now has a couple of thousand subscribers.  It's been really pretty exciting to have put something together, and watch it's use grow.  Part of the fun is using Google analytics to see where everyone is from.  All over the world.  That might sound a bit naive, but even though I'm no newcomer to the internet and technology, it's still a bit stunning.  I suppose I'm just finding out how much I enjoy c

BeTwittered updates are live.

Sat, 02/23/2008 - 05:37 — metarobert
I got a bit of a lesson this morning.  I updated BeTwittered, and was very pleased.  Well, until I noticed that the formatting was junk.  What did I learn?  Stylesheets get cached, and pretty liberally.  So if you were using BeTwittered this morning, and it suddenly looked a bit clunky, my apologies.  One interesting thing, IE was better than Firefox in this case.  It surprised me that IE picked up the changes when I closed it and re-opened.  Firefox was VERY stubborn...  So, here's the

A Couple Of Questions For You About BeTwittered.

Sun, 02/03/2008 - 05:06 — metarobert
I need a bit of help. I'd like to make a couple of improvements to BeTwittered, but I have a couple of questions I need some feedback on. I'm wondering if you (if you use BeTwittered) would like me to add those "posted about 1 hour ago" type of timestamps to messages. I really like them, but I'm not sure how important they are to everyone else. I suppose I could just put them in as an option. Question for you, then: Would you rather have the timestamps on or off by default? The other bit of help I need is from Mac users.

BeTwittered Gets an Update Tonight

Thu, 01/31/2008 - 10:49 — metarobert
I've been hacking about in PHP again.  Found that my use of ereg was outdated by pcre's preg while listening to PHP Architects  "Pro PHP podcast." Besides these archane regular expression changes internally, I've made some nice changes to BeTwittered, my Twitter gadget for Google homepage.  I've made clickable links of replies Now, clicking on an @username will take you to that users homepage.  I've also added a settings page, and moved the logout button there with the new "no pics" option.  I felt moving the logout option w
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